VYOV: Visualise your own vowels

A short introduction to Praat for complete beginners

Nay San

nay.san@anu.edu.au

Last updated 24 November, 2017

1 About

This workshop is designed for people with little experience in using Praat—a cross-platform, open-source phonetics program which assists in the recording, annotation, and analysis of speech sounds. Through the completion of short exercises, participants will be guided through a simple phonetics project from the recording stage to the report-writing stage.

In particular, we will 1) use Praat to record English vowels in /hVd/ environments (e.g. heed, hard, hair’d, horde, who’d), 2) learn to identify and label the vocalic components within the speech signal, 3) extract data of these vowels into tables for analysis, 4) produce relevant graphics both in Praat and a spreadsheet program (e.g. Google Sheets, or Excel), and 5) produce a brief report of the vowels, based on a supplied document template.

No practical experience with acoustic phonetics is assumed, though some basic familiarity of linguistics and speech production is preferred (e.g. completed a LING101 course). Participants should come with a laptop and with Praat downloaded and installed.Download links: MacOS, Windows, Linux

1.1 Goal

But am I lower?11test

From (Cox 2006Cox, Felicity. 2006. “The Acoustic Characteristics of/hVd/Vowels in the Speech of Some Australian Teenagers.” Australian Journal of Linguistics 26 (2): 147–79.)22Thanks to Simón Gonzalez for providing a tidy version of data from Cox (2006).

1.2

The table below lists a set of words with their IPA transcription for Australian English, according to the HCE vowel set (Harrington, Cox, and Evans 1997Harrington, Jonathan, Felicity Cox, and Zoe Evans. 1997. “An Acoustic Phonetic Study of Broad, General, and Cultivated Australian English Vowels.” Australian Journal of Linguistics 17 (2): 155–84.).

Stimulus word AusE transcription (HCE, 1997)
heed hiːd
hair’d heːd
hard hɐːd
horde hoːd
who’d hʉːd

2 References